I just came across a thorough presentation compiled by Greg Stuart, former CEO and President of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). It is called an “In-Depth Introduction to Internet Advertising” and is a whopping 82 slides. However, it contains many great sound-bites as well as stats that any interactive marketer should have in their arsenal.

Creating widgets with the goal of engaging the user once or twice and spam their friends, is about as forward-looking as putting radio on TV. I’m not going to say that it’s a waste of money – it’s just a waste of the medium, channel and audience attention.

As with the launch of any creative product— you sweat the details, hope for serendipity, send it out the door and wait for the reviews and ratings. The blogosphere reaction during this first week has been encouraging. FatMan Collective says it all, “Coke is also smart to create a widget that users should actually find useful, and not something that feels like advertising.” Yes, that was the entire point!!

These are exciting times for marketers wanting to get involved with social media. Virtually all the major social networks are opening up their platform with their own APIs or adopting open ‘standards’ like OpenSocial. This means more opportunities for marketers to develop meaningful, interactive, social applications to bring their brands to life.

It’s also exciting to see that when it comes to serving advertising to social network users, advertisers that are starting to get that they can’t just re-purpose their old banner ads – but need to engage their audience in meaningful ways.

We’re happy to announce that CokeTags, using Linkstorm’s PUP (Personal Universal Profile) technology, has gone live on Facebook today.

CokeTag is a Coca-Cola sponsored, customizable widget for individuals, bands, bloggers, artists, activists, - and others to showcase themselves and drive traffic to content they select. From a professional marketing point of view, it carries brand messaging into the Social Media space. While it launches on Facebook, we plan to expand the app into other social networks soon.